Equilibrium as a subject
The preliminary course a century ago set students a deceptively simple exercise: build a construction that holds its balance, and show how. These nine pieces take the exercise at gallery scale. Each is a hanging system of steel rod, painted aluminium discs and lead counterweights, trimmed until it floats level — then left alone to answer the room.
The turbine hall's air is never still. Doors, bodies, the afternoon sun on the west glazing: every disturbance travels the wires and settles into a new attitude, always balanced, never twice the same. The work is not the object but the recovery.
Tuning, not sculpting
Studio time was spent less like a sculptor's and more like a piano tuner's: shortening a rod by four millimetres, adding a five-gram washer, listening with a spirit level. The install took nine days, eight of which were trimming. Visitors are permitted — encouraged, by a sign the guards have learned to tolerate — to breathe on the smallest piece.